Developing Culturally and Historically Sensitive Teacher Education

Global Lessons from a Literacy Education Program

Yolanda Gayol Ramírez, Patricia Rosas Chávez, Peter Smagorinsky, Peter Smagorinsky, Yolanda Gayol Ramírez, Patricia Rosas Chávez

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350147454
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Languages

Shortlisted for the UK Literacy Association's Academic Book Award 2021 This volume explores the literacy education master's degree program developed at Universidad de Guadalajara in Jalisco, Mexico, with the aim of addressing the nation's emerging social, economic, technological, and political needs. Developing the program required taking into account the cultural diversity, historical economic disparities, indigenous and colonial cultures, and power inequities of the Mexican nation. These conditions have produced economic structures that maintain the status quo that concentrates wealth and opportunity in the hands of the very few, creating challenges for the education and economic life for the majority of the population. The program advocates providing tools for youth to critique and change their surroundings, while also learning the codes of power that provide them a repertoire of navigational means for producing satisfying lives. Rather than arguing that the program can be replicated or taken to scale in different contexts, the editors focus on how their process of looking inward to consider Mexican cultures enabled them to develop an appropriate educational program to address Mexico's historically low literacy rates. They show that if all teaching and learning is context-dependent, then focusing on the process of program development, rather than on the outcomes that may or may not be easily applied to other settings, is appropriate for global educators seeking to provide literacy teacher education grounded in national concerns and challenges. The volume provides a process model for developing an organic program designed to address needs in a national context, especially one grounded in both colonial and heritage cultures and one in which literacy is understood as a tool for social critique, redress, advancement, and equity.

Part 1

The Historical Context of the Initiative

1

Literacy to Soar

The Dream of a “New Mexico”

Patricia Rosas Chávez

This chapter situates Letras para Volar, and the master’s degree in literacy education that it includes at the University of Guadalajara, in the history and culture of Mexko: Wewenelwayotlaalli, the Nahuatl phrase for Mexico: Land of Ancestral Roots. This history includes the long period of unadulterated habitation by the land’s original people, whose spirit lives in the poem by the Acolhuan philosopher, warrior, architect, poet, and ruler

Nezahualcóyotl (1402–1472):

We have come to know your beautiful words.

The briefest instant, O friends!

But brief though it be, long may it live!

If teacher education is to be reinvented to help advance the nation to new, advanced literacy levels it is important to understand how the nation came into being and developed over time. This understanding requires attention to the people who constitute its population, the manner in which its diverse populations produce cultural variation that can be challenging to address in classrooms and educational policies, how its economic history has produced inequities and corruption that circumscribe opportunity and the potential of people from outside the wealthy and dominant elite, and other factors that a literacy education must take into account to achieve its goals. Educators in other nations, especially those with both original people and colonial histories who hope to reinvent literacy teacher education, might benefit from seeing how a historical reflection may inform ambitions to shift a national culture toward a more literate citizenry.

This chapter reviews central aspects of Mexican history, establishing the convergence of historical pathways that have produced the present, and anticipating how Letras para Volar in general, and the master’s degree in particular, can create a better future in the “New Mexico” we envision.

Mexico: A Brief Introduction

The United Mexican States is the southernmost nation in North America and the northernmost nation in Latin America, and is the most populous Spanish-speaking country on earth. It is a democratic, representative, and federal republic composed of thirty-two states. Among them is the national capital Mexico City¹ , which in 2016 was reclassified as an autonomous state. It is the largest city in the Western Hemisphere with a metropolitan area of over 21 million people. Mexico is bordered to the north by the United States and to the south by Guatemala and Belize. Its 1,964,375 square kilometers makes it the fifteenth largest country in the world (Central Intelligence Agency, 2017) and its 124.5 million inhabitants comprise 1.68 percent of the total world population. It ranks tenth globally in density, with 65.6 persons per square kilometer, no doubt skewed by the great concentration of people in Mexico City and other cities, including Guadalajara. It also includes vast rural areas that are sparsely populated, contributing to challenges in providing equitable education for urban and rural areas, given their vastly different populations and needs. Mexico has a great diversity of climates, from warm-humid and temperate-humid to dry and polar. The land is populated by a rich diversity of flora and fauna that make it one of the twelve countries in the world considered to be megadiverse, since it harbors between 65 percent and 70 percent of global biodiversity (Llorente-Busquets & Ocegueda, 2008).

Our ancestors have given Mexico great linguistic variety. Mexico’s official language today is Spanish. Nevertheless, according to estimations from the 2015 intercensal survey by the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía), more than seven million people speak an original language, representing 6.52 percent of the country’s total population. Prior to the Spanish Conquest there were more than 200 original languages spoken in modern-day Mexico (Benavides, Del Valle, & Valdés, 2008), of which at least 68 have survived. Nahuatl (pronounced NÄ-wätl), Maya, Tzeltal ((t)sel-täl), and Mixtec (mē-ˈstek) are among the most prominent.

Many Mexicans speak more than one language. Roughly 6 percent speak both Spanish and an original language (Statista, 2005); and 2 to 5 percent speak English, with the Secretary of Education predicting that within a generation, Mexico will be fully bilingual in Spanish and English (Mexico News Daily, 2015). This diversity provides Mexico with rich cultural possibilities. It also complicates literacy efforts, which tend to be evaluated according to such narrow assessments as international standardized tests in a single official language, in this case Spanish. This multilingual dimension suggests that a literacy education program should be attentive to the role of translanguaging (see Introduction, this volume), that is, the blending of languages by individuals and groups; and that schools should recognize that the language of testing may produce scores that do not reflect the sophisticated language practices used by people speaking and meshing multiple tongues. This tension between respect for diversity, and an emphasis on literacy development measured through standardized assessments, creates a major challenge for a literacy education initiative.

The Mexican constitution provides autonomy to its original cultures, the people of which retain the right to their own language, literacy practices, rites and rituals, and other matters of self-determination. The Mexican lands originally hosted diverse cultures, each possessing its own identity, cosmogony, language, gastronomy, science, and art; and each sharing a dedication to cultivating knowledge, producing art and architecture, valuing friendship, and holding a deep respect for nature.

Mexico’s Great Original Cultures

I will review five major societies in the order in which they appeared, beginning with the Olmecs, considered the region’s foundational culture. I wil l continue with the Maya, and then address the most representative culture of the state of Jalisco where Guadalajara resides, the Huicholes or Wixaritari. Next came the culture that constructed the great Atlantean columns, the Toltecs, and finally the last major civilization before the Spanish Conquest, the Aztecs. These societies were significant on their own terms and have helped to produce the Mexico we know today. They illustrate how original people are not monolithic, as a standardized curriculum would assume, but rather have produced cultural streams that remain vital and that converge in Mexico’s overcrowded classrooms. Paz (1985) described this diversity as part of Mexico’s historical legacy:

When we consider what Mexico was like at the arrival of Cortés, we are surprised at the large number of cities and cultures, in contrast to the relative homogeneity of their most characteristic traits. The diversity of the indigenous nuclei and the rivalries that lacerated them indicate that Mesoamerica was made up of a complex of autonomous people, nations and cultures, each with its own traditions, exactly as in the Mediterranean and other cultural areas. Mesoamerica was a historical world in itself. (p. 90)

What follows cannot possibly capture the wealth of diversity in the human population of pre-Conquest Mexico. These major civilizations were the dominant, but by no means exclusive, inhabitants of the land.

Olmec Culture

In the Nahuatl language, “Olmec” means Land of Olman (rubber). The Olmecs are considered the original civilization of Mesoamerica, appearing simultaneously in the Balsas River basin, the Valley of Mexico, the Gulf Coast facing the Atlantic Ocean, and other areas in this region around the year 1200 BCE (Escalante, 2008). The inhabitants of the region cultivated corn, engaged in fishing and hunting, used precious stones to make offerings, and harvested rubber from local trees (Rusby, 1909). The rubber provided the material for the ball used in the juego de pelota Maya (Maya ballgame), played both recreationally and ritualistically and still played today by descendants of some original groups. The game was banned by Torquemada, the Dominican friar and first Grand Inquisitor, as part of the Spanish effort to eradicate original cultures. Yet it survived as a spiritual performance of the creation of the universe, replicating a battle between gods and demons, with the gods’ victory allowing them to create a new race of humans from the bones of the dead.

Olmec social structure consisted of rulers, priests, sages, artists, merchants, farmers, craft-makers, builders, and servants, a hierarchical social organization common to original groups on the continent. The Olmecs lived in tribes led by chiefs called Chichimecatl. Their culture was polytheistic, a belief system that allowed them to absorb the Christian deity following the Conquest without losing their own gods, a process still underway (Gallaher, 2007), and a complicating factor in making clear distinctions between original and colonial people. Their gods were associated with elements of nature such as the sun, volcanoes, water, and agriculture. Their supreme deity was the jaguar, which represented the predecessors of the spirits of nature and took the form of a jaguar-human (see Chapter 3).

The Cascajal Block, a tablet-sized writing slab, stands among the most important recent discoveries about the Olmec culture. The Block is approximately 3,000 years old, suggesting that it is the oldest writing on the continent. It consists of sixty-two glyphs and, although its exact meaning has not been deciphered, presumably was produced to express ideas about everyday life. According to MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient Stephen D. Houston, “It is the first Olmec evidence of writing. . . . it means nothing less than that the Olmecs had literature, that they were able to communicate their culture to future generations, that they were, in short, a much more complex and rich civilization than we had imagined” (cited in Rodríguez et al., 2006, p. 24). The “we” of his phrasing appears to represent the Western anthropological community within which he worked. The Olmecs themselves had, for centuries, considered their society to be complex and rich. This exercise in perspective-taking illustrates the ways in which outsiders, even those who are considered brilliant, can have difficulty escaping their colonial perspective when forming images of those from foreign cultures.

Literacy long predated the arrival of the Spaniards, albeit with a different language, script, and purpose. As Smagorinsky (2011) has argued based on the work of Schmandt-Besserat (2011) and Woods (2010), literacy practices represent cultural orientations and can indicate how a society is organized and how its activities are directed. European writing developed in large part to catalogue Mesopotamian mercantile exchanges, suggesting its capitalist roots. The Olmec script, instead, featured the quality of everyday life. These divergent uses for writing, and the different values they represented, had devastating consequences for the later Mexican soci...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Notes on the Editorial Process
• Introduction: Reinventing Teacher Education for the Mexican Context
• Part 1 The Historical Context of the Initiative
• Part 2 Social and Cognitive Issues in Literacy Education
• Part 3 Literacy and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) Education
• Part 4 Research and Evaluation
• Part 5 Looking Back and Looking Ahead
• Conclusion: Networking Letras para Volar into the Future
• Appendix
• Index
• Copyright